This award will enable Dr. Donald L. Court and co-workers at Bionetics Research Inc. - Basic Research Program, Frederick Cancer Research Facility, Frederick, MD to collaborate with Prof. Yoshikazu Nakamura and his group at the University of Tokyo, Japan, over a period of two years. They will join in a project aimed at determining how the rnc and era genes encode RNaseIII and Era, which are involved in the life cycle of the E. coli bacteria. Specifically, these researchers will determine the function of the era gene product; determine the structural and functional organization of the rnc-era operon; determine the various controls exerted on rnc-era operon expression; and determine the biochemical and genetic interactions that these proteins may have with other proteins. The purpose of this research is to apply a unified approach using both physiological genetics and biochemistry to analyze the interaction between these two genes, which are of importance in cell growth. These genes are known to separately encode products in E. coli, and therefore there is the possibility of a relationship between them, a possibility which will be investigated in this project. The collaboration between the U.S. investigator, known for his work in bacterial and phage genetics, and the Japanese investigator, a respected molecular geneticist, should lead to an increase in the fundamental knowledge base, particularly of how proteins are modulated and how they modulate other systems.
